Bureaucrats and the web: a strange marriage!
May 5, 2010
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Way back in early 1995, a bunch of mavericks in the European Commission started the Europa server. Mavericks, indeed, if you look back and see how it all started. We had Netscape as browser and I bought myself the first HTML editor for 10$!
It wasn’t until the end of 1999 that anyone above us (plus the lawyers) realised what we were doing. Y2K was a wake up call for many people, but also for those who made webpages of the European Commission. Life became a bit more serious and in 2001 we had our first official EUROPA strategy. It established the WWW as the corner stone of the communication strategy and devoted much more attention to multilingualism (i.e. as many EU languages as possible should be used on our websites).
Searching the web, I found EUROPA pages of 1996 for the Commission and for the research department where I worked (called DG XII). Making webpages those days was easy, wasn’t it?
Getting information from a bureaucracy into the real web world in a meaningful way has remained an uphill struggle ever since. First of all, we produce documents that rival each other in length and obscurity, and secondly, we prefer to keep these documents to ourselves! Once we believe they can go out, we throw them out. Gerry McGovern talked about “put-it-uppers”. Yes, that’s what we did for many years.
As a result, the EUROPA server has, no doubt, the largest collection of bureaucratese literature but will never win a Nobel Prize (for peace or anything else!).
With the arrival of social media such as Facebook and Twitter, we entered Alice in Wonderland. For the first time in the history of the web it seems that the good old website and its homepage are no longer at the front door but rather in the back office. But “social” media are based on people and faces, aren’t they? And aren’t all bureaucrats by definition “faceless”?
Mia Garlick writes in her blog “The ‘Faceless Bureaucrat’ and Web 2.0”:
There are some inherent tensions between the practice of Web 2.0 and the practice of Government. Web 2.0 tends to be characterised by a sense of the personal, a sense of immediacy and a sense of informality. All these things mean that mistakes in the Web 2.0 world can and are made readily but are equally readily corrected, sometimes by the original contributor, sometimes by the crowd.
The practice of Government, on the other hand, tends to be the opposite of each of these things. Instead of being personal, we have the stereotype of the “faceless bureaucrat”. Instead of being immediate, Government announcements and actions can take a while to be forthcoming while all possible stakeholders are consulted and points of view are considered. Instead of being informal, Government-speak is quite formal with each word chosen very carefully. Government processes are set up to minimise, if not completely avoid, the chance of making a mistake.
If the mavericks that started the EUROPA server had been the ideal bureaucrats, I am sure it would never have seen the daylight! We made many mistakes (and still do), skipped procedures, went ahead, took risks and much more.
Much depended on individuals who were thinking and working “out of the box”. The Eurocontrol case shows again that you need brave individuals to get the ball rolling. So, let’s pull up our sleeves and get on it. Social media, here we come!
Dick Nieuwenhuis
Head of Section Electronic & Audiovisual Information
European Commission – External Relations
You can follow Dick on Twitter @dicknieuwenhuis or his own blog dicknieuwenhuis.wordpress.com.
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May 5th, 2010 at 12:01 pm
I agree Dick. And to document your argument let me add what Charles Darwin said: “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
This is our constant uphill struggle, to try to convince those who are not already convinced that we have to respond to change FAST and embrace it. This is one of the weakest links of the EU institutions in general.
May 5th, 2010 at 1:56 pm
Interesting history!
Do you have an exact date when the first Europa pages have been launched in 1995? It would be interesting to celebrate 15 years Europa server.
May 5th, 2010 at 2:22 pm
DG XII (as RTD was called at that time) started to prepare for the website in March 1995 and the first site went live in July that same year. CORDIS (under DG XIII now INFSO) was active at the end of 1994, to be fair. I think the EUROPA server as such (europa.eu.int) must have been launched in spring 1995. Will ask the other dinosaurs from the early days.
:-
May 5th, 2010 at 2:36 pm
Has there ever been a grave mistake, one that had a visible political or financial impact? Has Maverick-ness ever been sanctioned?
May 5th, 2010 at 3:06 pm
Ha Julien! That’s the million dollar question, right?
)))
What is a grave mistake? To put something up without asking the entire hierarchy first (“grave mistake” for any Beambte!)?
I have never been sanctioned, frankly speaking but also decided not to make much of a career. Both could be connected.
And I am not aware of financial (what kind?) or political (what type?) of impact. These sort of things are usually done at levels well beyond mine.
May 9th, 2010 at 7:34 pm
Aah, the good ‘ole days!
Although I seem to remember you complaining, Dick, that you had to remove the ‘l’ from the .html files I was sending you so that you could check them on your windows3 machine, and then add them back before sending them to the unix server. Intellectually easy, perhaps, but talk about tiresome!
June 7th, 2010 at 1:34 pm
Dick makes the right point – fortunately, the people who would sanction Maverick-ness if it appeared in paper form are not usually in a position to recognise it when it is on the web. So no sanctions, which results in progress.